There’s something self-reflexive about Main Actor Nahin Hoon arriving in theatres at all. Written and directed by Aditya Kripalani, the intimate two-hander stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Chitrangada Satarupa as two lonely people who begin connecting through online acting sessions. Shot between India and Germany, often through real-time video calls, the film is interested in performance in every sense of the word: the roles we play for each other, for the camera, for ambition, for survival.
Which makes it fitting that the conversation around the film quickly spirals into a larger lament about Hindi cinema itself — its shrinking spaces, its obsession with optics, and the slow disappearance of emotional messiness from the screen.
Siddiqui, who once altered the grammar of the Hindi film leading man with films like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox, says he often thinks about the pre-pandemic era when “small, content-driven films” still had room to breathe theatrically. “Today spectacle cinema is working, which is fine,” he says evenly. “But somewhere the space for smaller films seems to be disappearing. Hopefully that phase returns again. I’m hopeful.”
Kripalani traces the collapse of that ecosystem to the pandemic-era streaming boom. There was once a thriving space, he says, for “engaging middle-of-the-road cinema” — films like Khosla Ka Ghosla!, Bheja Fry, and Paan Singh Tomar that could exist theatrically without requiring franchise-sized spectacle. “Then OTT came in and that space moved online,” Kriplani says. “Earlier, streaming catered to edgy cinema. But after the pandemic, OTT platforms suddenly became mass platforms. They had to cater to everybody.”
What changed alongside the platforms, he argues, was the audience itself. “We’ve lost the habit of voting for films with money,” Kripalani says. “Earlier, you watched a trailer, chose one film and went to theatres for it. Now we’re endlessly scrolling through a buffet of content, unable to decide what to consume.”
And yet, paradoxically, audiences have also become more discerning. “Both things have happened simultaneously,” he says. “Audiences now expect better filmmaking because they’ve seen better filmmaking globally. But we’ve also lost the collective ritual of choosing cinema in theatres.”
Even Main Actor Nahin Hoon had to claw its own way into cinemas. “No, but we’re doing it ourselves,” Kripalani says when asked whether the film’s theatrical release feels symbolic in today’s climate. “That’s why it’s happening.” He laughs, but only slightly. “We are distributing the film ourselves. We are putting the money and muscle behind it ourselves. Nobody else came and said, ‘This film deserves theatres.’ We’ve had to handle everything ourselves, right till delivery,” says the filmmaker.
Is that the only way middle-of-the-road cinema survives theatrically now? “At this point,” he says, “unfortunately, yes,” says Kriplani.
But if the economics of cinema have changed, Siddiqui and Kripalani seem equally disturbed by how acting itself has transformed in the age of social media performance. Kripalani points to something deceptively small: the self-taped audition. “One huge thing people don’t talk about is this — earlier audition cameras didn’t have screens,” he says. “You faced the camera, but you couldn’t see yourself.” Now, actors are constantly performing while watching themselves perform. “Especially during self-tapes, people are hyper-aware of their face, expressions, how they’re appearing to others. Self-tapes have been a huge pain for acting, honestly.”
Siddiqui nods in immediate agreement. For him, the problem runs deeper than technology. “Nowadays everyone wants to look good all the time,” Siddiqui says. “I don’t understand this insecurity. Whether your character looks good or bad shouldn’t matter — you are supposed to play the character truthfully.”
Instead, he says, appearance has become the performance itself. “Even if the character demands ugliness or discomfort, actors still want to look attractive. Somewhere acting has disappeared and looking good has become the main concern,” says Siddiqui.
The absurdity of it reveals itself most clearly in casting briefs. Siddiqui mentions phrases like “upmarket look” and “aspirational look” as shorthand that has replaced emotional specificity. “Somewhere content gets forgotten,” he says. “The internal conflict, the emotional depth — all of that goes very far away.” When he learns about a casting call looking for “20–30 year olds who look good crying,” Siddiqui bursts out laughing.
“Exactly!” he adds. “‘Should look good while crying.’ Unfathomable.” When he first told friends and family he wanted to become an actor, he recalls, people laughed at him. “They said, ‘Look at your face. You shouldn’t even dream of becoming an actor.’” His response, in hindsight, sounds almost liberating. “I said, ‘I know. I know I’m not conventionally good-looking. I’m aware of that. Now let me act.’” That acceptance, he says, became an advantage. “Very early in life, I stopped worrying about how I looked and started focusing on my craft and skills instead.”